Rod, well we both led with the same story today.
Hay does that mean we think like journalists. We did head in somewhat different directions. My followup conventional nuclear is still the lowest cost rout to CO2 mitigation. "It would appear then that there would be a green premium - oh irony of ironies - of $53 a ton, for the use of natural gas rather than nuclear as a means of CO2 mitigation."
Ontario has said that the price of these new reactors is too high and wants the Feds to cover any cost overruns, something that Ottawa could conceivably decide not to if AECL was sold, so the Provence is looking for further guarantees. However without a sale on the books, it is unlikely that the company can be sold.
The fact of the matter is that the real cause of unexpected costs and delays is due the the regulatory environment in Canada because AECL has demonstrated elsewhere that it can bring in a CANDU 6 at a cost and schedule competitive with a coal burning plant of the same capacity. Improving this, which is in the hands of the Federal government, would be the single biggest help to nuclear energy in Canada. Personally I would start by cleaning house at the CNSC which has not made any significant improvement to safety in the industry and has only served as a dumping ground for political hacks.
I find it very curious that Jeff Immelt, CEO of GE, never publicly mentions the "N" word. He goes out of his way to extol the virtues of GE wind and GE solar in the ecomagination commercials. And he had NBC and MS NBC fight tooth and nail to get Obama elected, and Obama is big on wind and all the eco-power nonsense. Indeed, after it was certain Obama would win, GE-Hitachi laid off all its contractors working on ESBWR, and even some in-house people. And this thing about resurrecting ABWR is a joke. GEH doesn't have the umph (can't think of a better word) to get it going. Toshiba-Westinghouse will have better luck building ABWR in South Texas (remember GE tried to de-nuke itself in the 90s and sold the rights for ABWR to Toshiba which later bought Westinghouse). Hey, Jeff Immelt is in it for the short haul. He'll make out great and then when all these wind turbines turn out to be useless monstosities, he'll be retired with his pot of gold. BTW, he was wheeling and dealing with the mad mullahs of Iran up to 2005. Money via corporate socialism is his motto.
A bunch of points:
AECL is designing the ACR-1000, but it will be mostly built by a consortium of private companies call Team CANDU. It includes GE-Hitachi Nuclear, Babcock & Wilcox Canada, Hitachi Canada and SNC-Lavalin Nuclear. SNC-Lavalin is a huge Canadian company that is very good at mega construction and energy projects.
Ontario Hydro, OPG today, was responsible for building the Darlington Plant. Darlinton was hijacked by the labour trades and other groups resulting in delay and huge cost over-runs. Since OPG is a public utility, they had little motive to keep the project on budget and on time. While the Darlington reactors were of an orphan design the problems was more things like getting concrete poured on time than problems with the reactor design. I assume that SNC-Lavelin will will be the General contractor with the Ontario new builds, but I really don't know.
The CANDUs were picked because All the design work and most of the part supplied will be built in Ontario. Now the Ontario Government is just negotiating the price and for Federal subsidies.
These reactor likely would mean a substantial rate increase for electricity. The reason is because Ontario already has rediculously cheap power from nuclear plants that are mostly paid for.
The Ontario Government is complaining about the cost of new nuclear. It is ironic since they are currently paying Less than $0.05/kwh for non-peak nuclear and paying $0.135/kwh for wind with no control of supply and $0.443 for solar.
http://www.powerauthority.on.ca/
...ch_13__2009.pdf
I have seen this claim that the Darlinton build was hijacked by the labour unions pushing the cost up before, but I have seen very little in the way of proof to back this assertion. I wonder if you would be so good as to point me at some historical reference?
It is my suspicion that the companies you listed may well wind up owning the CANDU division of AECL as a consortium, which might be for the best.
I knew a someone who was involved in the construction, working directly for Ontario Hydro management. He claimed that the Mob with Union connections delayed the construction at every opportunity. Everytime safty was questioned or a non-union member tried to deliver anything, work would stop.
This was his point of view, It likely was more an issue of a government owned public utility that was so afraid of public criticism that they let anyone extort them to keep them quiet.
Does anyone know anything about the success or failure of AECL first CANDU 6? The Point Lepreu Nuclear was built in Canada, had a single reactor and completed in 8 years. When googling it I have read about cost overruns on it's retubinng, but have found nothing on it's original construction overruns. Could this be an example of AECL ability to build a reactor in Canada with out OPG's involvement?
Well to me anecdotal evidence is no evidence at all. I'm sure your friend might have been frustrated, being a manager on a unionized project, because that requires more work on his part, but it is not proof of organized crime.
Point Lepreu has been a very good reactor, and they are now looking at a second one, strictly to export power to the States. This would be the first strictly merchant reactor in Canada. The community already rode the antinukes out on a rail when they came to 'help' the good folks there fight the new plant.
The Maritimes, being a relatively poor part of Canada, has always understood the importance of jobs, and have little use for people from outside the region telling them what to do.
Was Point Lepreu close to being on budget?
Point Lepreau, like all domestic undertakings of AECL went two to three times over initial estimates, depending on who you talk to. On the other hand almost all the CANDU builds offshore were on time and on budget, so the problem is systemic to Canada.
It is my understanding, reading between the lines, that local contractors were not really prepared for this sort of project and this caused delays which translated into backend costs.
Remember Point Lepreau was the first of the CANDU 6 reactors.
I also think Canadian politics contributed to AECL under bidding to get the sale.
With the high inflation of the seventies, and an 8 year build time would also contribute. This would contribute to cost over runs at any type of plant built anywhere in North America.
"I also think Canadian politics contributed to AECL under bidding to get the sale.
AECL is a Crown Corporation and at the time had a legal monopoly on building nuclear reactors in Canada. There was no need for it to underbid.
I suspect that part of the problem is simply that no-one really knows where energy prices are going to go. It's certainly clear that gas prices in particular are becoming more unstable, but at least in North America, where the supply is relatively secure (not here in Europe, where we depend on Mr Putin for gas) it is certainly not definite that prices will go up dramatically in the near future.
Of course, if prices DO go up or if actual supply problems turn up, it will be far too late.
"I also think Canadian politics contributed to AECL under bidding to get the sale."
I should have said local politics. While AECL was the only reactor producer licensed in Canada, New Brunswick Power was not forced to buy nuclear.
New Brunswick had a good supply of local coal. New Brunswick Power even owned their own coal mines. At the time Nuclear must seem more like a high tech toy for the Bureaucrats. More about bragging right than anything else. New Brunswick power was involved in the construction, so they have to take responsibility for accepting the estimates for their portion of the construction and failing to meet the esimates. Since the consumer pays the bills, they would be happy with getting their expensive toy.
None of this can be proven of coarse.
The CANDU reactor is different from the PWR. Much of the cost comes from pouring concret and welding pipes by local tradesmen. Cost overruns come form delays in work done onsite. Not from the cost of high tech parts purchased.
Not really, most of the reactor is built off site and the rest is no different from any other thermal plant.
High pressure welding of zircaloy isn't something that you can leave to local tradespeople.
At any rate the area is also home to Canada's shipbuilding industry, so there was probably no lack of steamfitters for the non-nuclear part of the work.
Point Lepreau is no toy it supplies a third of New Brunswick's electrical energy and even at the time it was understood that local coal was not going to remain cheap. In fact NB Power's Belledune plant currently burns coal produced in the Cerrejón mine from Columbia. This despite the fact that there are total proven reserves of coal in New Brunswick estimated to be 9 million tonnes of bituminous A.
Strangely enough while coal power plants there have the capacity to produce 570MWe, oil fired generation can produce 1,559MWe.
Things are not as simple as you might think.
Colombia is a long way to go to get coal. It is likely that the local coal, New Bruswick and US has too much sulfur in it.
Today coal power is dead for environmental reasons. Less of a concern in the 1970's.
Zirconium alloys is only used inside the Calandria. The Candu has a lot more plumbing outside the reactor than a PWR.
Richard - it might be a long way from Columbia to NB, but it is a pretty cheap transport route on the high seas.
Cost per ton mile for large ships is darned low compared to railroads or trucks.
Bituminous A is the most common grade used for generating electricity all over North America. NB Power uses all the coal that is mined in NB, they just can't get enough. Opening new mines is expensive. The point here being that nuclear energy was a sound business move for that Provence.
As for wielding, as I pointed out, there is no lack of local skills in steamfitting, which is the only area that would be done on site. Delays are not a skills issue, or a labor issue, or a materials issue.
Reactor cost overruns in Canada are largely due to the regulatory environment, which is also true in the States. These cause endless delays that push up the cost of any nuclear project.
The point here is that AECL can work better offshore than it can in Canada.
So coal power plants should mostly be located on natural harours so they can use all the Colombian coal and not have to rely on rail?
Richard - as near as I can tell, that is where many coal plants are located today. Close to high volume fuel delivery and to large heat sinks.
Of course, if the plants are a bit away from the fuel delivery location, that does not negate the low cost of moving the fuel most of the way via ocean shipping. Last I checked, New Brunswick has a LOT of harbors.
Just to beat a dead horse. I did some researce.
I was wrong about New Brunswick's abundance of coal. They do have a coal resource, but I guess it is not abundant enough for them to persue. NB Powers 2 coal plants. They are both inland and are old and very small. There is a large coal supply of within 50 mile by rail or within 100 miles by ship in the nabouring province of Nova Scotia.
The US exports Huge amounts of coal from your East coast ports to the far corners to the globe. The distance from the US mines to your East coast ports is the same as for Colombia. For the cost of loading and unloading the trains, I would think it would be easier just to ship directly by rail from Pennsylvania to NB. If NB Power is getting coal from Colombia, it would be to get lower sulfur content.
NB Power buys coal from Colombia because it is cheap. It is cheap because the labor costs of producing a ton of coal in Colombia is lower that it is anywhere in North America.
NB Power has been heavily criticized by several Canadian groups that support Fair Trade due to what they feel is bad working condition and pay at Cerrejón mine and by green groups that claim Cerrejon coal mine is systematically violating international environmental law, and finally by those that claim that there are constant human rights violations against the local population.
In other words it has nothing to do with sulfur and everything to do with price. The coal is cheap there, cheap enough to offset the transportation costs.
If transportation was an issue the could get plenty of coal from Nova Scotia next door, long before they would have to buy from Pennsylvania.
So the Caribbean, South America, African, and Asian countries buy American coal.
The biggest importers of coal from Colombia is North America and Europe.
Odd, the US imports from Colombia and exports coal to Asia?
From AECL's website:
Q. Why was the cost of Ontario’s Darlington plant so high?
A. About 70% of Darlington's final cost increase was due to schedule delays and financial policy changes. The remainder of the increase is attributable to changes in scope, including that imposed by an evolving regulatory environment over the course of the project.
I think that AECL previously had a description of the project that indicated that the province of Ontario and its utility decided it would be cheaper to be their own project manager than to allow AECL to take on the project as a turnkey - the idea being that the Province would keep the project management profits for itself. Unfortunately, the Province overestimated its abilities to manage a project of this scale and budgetary pressures led it to halt construction several times, leading to very expensive restarts.
Cost overruns and delays are not peculiar to the nuclear power industry. I lived in Canberra during the entire period of construction of Parliament House, a project that ended up costing three times the original estimate, although the scheduling delay was not quite as bad (it had to be complete by 1988, the Bi-Centennial of European settlement in Australia). Right at the end they were trying to save every dollar they could. At one time the government announced it would not do any landscaping and save $6 million, however, the people of Canberra immediately announced that they'd take up a collection to pay for the landscaping, leading the government to an embarrassing back down.
Working out the best way to share the risk of a major infrastructure project is always challenging. Oftentimes politics gets in the way of good business decisions. Politicians want to put the risk onto the contractor, but not allow the contractor to reap the rewards commensurate with that risk. Unfortunately, most politicians (and most everyone really) want their cake and to eat it too.
I also don't think that General Electric is committed as a corporation to nuclear power. I think that GE's nuclear business would thrive if GE were to sell it to Hitachi. Westinghouse Nuclear thrives because it is part of a company that is committed to developing nuclear power plants, if it were still owned by CBS I'm sure it would be withering on the vine.
GE only owns part of GE Nuclear. They own 100% or GE Wind.
Hitachi likely wants to keep the GE name to help sales in the US. It would make sense for Hitchi to take the majority stake in GE Nuclear.
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